One of the first houses in Providence to sport Greek Revival monumentality and detailing, albeit applied to a long-standing domestic-architecture form, this was designed and built by Warren, Tallman & Bucklin, the design-and-build firm then at work on the monumental Greek Revival Arcade. Enoch Clarke sold this house soon after construction to John Slater, brother of Samuel Slater, who introduced mechanized textile production to the United States in the 1790s. John Slater came to this country around 1805 to manage Slatersville, the new textile-mill village in North Smithfield, Rhode Island. His descendant, Horatio, gave the house in 1901 to Brown University for use as a dormitory for the recently established women’s college, Pembroke. It was remodeled on the inside and expanded to the west in the 1960s by the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island as an elderly-care facility. Unfortunately, the addition uses the same architectural vocabulary as the Diocesan offices on North Main Street (Episcopal Cathedral of St John & Diocesan Office) but, fortunately, is far less visible from this vantage than from below.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
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